A man named Steven Martin is displaying old-fashioned Halloween photos on his Flickr page. Titled "Halloween in the Time of Cholera" the collection is funny, bizarre, and often deeply disturbing. Click here for a look.

Extremely short fiction -- also called "flash fiction" -- is an ideal form for scary tales. Horror works best through a mix of suggestion and carefully chosen detail. When you boil down a plot to a few hundred words, these stand out more vividly. Creating dark flash fiction is one of my goals at this blog. And over at www.microhorror.com they've put up a big tent and built a carnival of the stuff. Countless terrifying stories, each no more than 666 words. I've contributed my humble tale about a staircase to their impressive library. Have a look.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

It’s simple. You write the name of someone you hate onto a piece of yellow card stock and seal it into a linen envelope. Take the evening’s last train. Sit in the third car from the end. A thin man in a dark wine-colored suit with skin like old paper approaches and guides you out into the jumbled streets of some factory city. You reach a bulkhead door in a backyard pocked with dead spots of bare, hard dirt. Down in that cellar you find the thing in the box.

You don't see it. The cheap plywood lid opens toward you, blocking your view. Perhaps you catch a glimpse of claw or filthy hair. But nothing more, and you're grateful. Because when the man in the wine suit takes your envelope you notice one of his fingernails missing. And when he looks down at it he swallows as his spine goes a bit soft. Shuffling and hissing comes from the box along with wet sounds the thing makes gobbling your name. The cellar fills with the smell of old meat and sour milk. The man seems older and impossibly tired as he leads you away.

Soon the one you hate loses her job. Or his wife leaves him. She thins out as her stomach, her throat, her breasts bloom cancer. As he drinks until his face becomes yellow, yellow as the card stock. The one you hate doesn't die easily or soon. Three years pass before you read the notice in the news.

And of course by then you’ve aged yourself. Until your skin is like paper. Until you swallow and feel queasy at a train’s whistle. Until your spine goes a bit soft when the mail comes to your door. Because one day, you’re certain it will be a wine-colored suit, just your size, and you’ll have to go.

Follow Me On Facebook

Twitter Feed

A Novel Of Supernatural Horror

What Readers Are Saying About THE BLACK BOOK OF CHILDREN'S BIBLE STORIES...

"A smart, sad, introspective and highly original story, one that leaves a trail of questions in the imagination... Highly recommended."

"...a commentary on the nature of God... this is a book that lingers even after it is finished."

"Buy this book. If you have the spare cash, buy this book and then buy another copy so you can loan it to people who will buy it themselves."

"...about claiming an individual identity in suburban America – about how to settle up to your Christian inheritance – and about how life-affirming and painful it is to love. This is an important novel from a fine writer, and you’ll be glad you have read it."

Sexual fantasies, desperation...

...cat-sitting... The Big Money is about these things. And also love, loneliness, the Spider Demon at the end of Doom, and working at a fashion magazine.It is true in the emotional, but not legally actionable sense.Buy it on Kindle......or Nook.